Entry № 8887 · English origin

Rowena Rowena — Meaning, Origin & Baby Name Popularity

/ roh-EE-nah /
Gender
Girl
Origin
English
Meaning
"Fame and joy (Ivanhoe heroine; Rowena Ravenclaw, Harry Potter)"
Syllables
3
First recorded
Medieval (English)

A name that means "fame and joy (ivanhoe heroine; rowena ravenclaw, harry potter)".

Rowena is possibly from the Old Germanic hrod ("fame") + wunn ("joy") — or the Old English name Hróðwynn. Lady Rowena of Hengist — semi-legendary 5th-century Saxon princess; her marriage to Vortigern, King of the Britons, is told in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1136); medieval origin legend of Anglo-Saxon England. Rowena King — Trinidadian-British actress (Stargate Atlantis).

Fame and joy.

The name in its native script.

Rowena
Transliteration
Rowena
Pronunciation
/ roʊˈiː.nə /
Root
Grammatical form

Where Rowena stands.

Rowena does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.

Rowenas before her.

Real people
Rowena Morrill
American fantasy artist.
1944 – 2021
Rowena King
Trinidadian-British actress.
born 1972
In fiction
Rowena Ravenclaw
Harry Potter.
1997
Lady Rowena
Scott's Ivanhoe.
1819

Names connected to Rowena.

The number behind Rowena.

4

The Builder

In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Rowena reduce to 4, The Builder. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.